Varana

I'm pretty sure that isn't what I suspect, but what is it?

My answer to the original question: No. Turn-based and Real time (with pause or not) have a very different feel to them. In TB, every fight interrupts whatever you were doing (probably walking around), and creates a special situation separated from the rest of the game, often with different abilities for your party members, and possibly even with changes to the interface. The game is noticeably divided into a fighting part and a non-fighting part. Due to the necessity to set up combat mode, switch to a different time scale, and handle every character separately, it usually takes a lot of time. In RtwP, combat is more integrated into the general gameplay. You go from exploring to combat more organically, and it's usually faster. The price to pay is a certain loss of control - if you're not essentially turning it into TB with lots of pauses, you won't be able to micromanage all of your party at the same level. Ideally, TB games should concentrate on fewer but more elaborate set-piece battles, while RtwP can get away with a certain amount of trash mobs. It is possible to have trash mobs in a TB game (Wizardry 8, RIP), but it's usually a bad idea. In RtwP, lots of weak enemies can create the frantic atmosphere of being zerg rushed, and it generally manages to capture some of what's good about RTS combat, while enabling almost the same level of control as TB games. RtwP is, by nature, a compromise, and as such, it doesn't excel in a specific area as the more specialised systems, but it adds another aspect to the experience that the "pure" form is lacking. So if you're a fan of the chess-like turn-based combat, the game might have been better with it. If you're a fan of hectic real time combat, the necessity to pause will be tedious to you. RtwP's strength is to unite both - while the combat might have been better (in whichever direction you're leaning), it is good enough to be fun.

Also, depending on your party composition, equipment, and play style, the levels might not become more difficult in a linear way. I for one found level 3 harder than the next two or so.

But you can't "craft" weapons, armour and other accessories in the game. You can enchant them (which is called "crafting" for some reason) to give them some bonuses. You can create potions, scrolls, and food stuff, though. So your assumed trend doesn't seem very plausible to me. The player cannot craft "pretty much all items", and most enchantments are only available on pre-made items, so self-enchanted stuff doesn't challenge or surpass the best found equipment. That doesn't mean that PoE's crafting system is a good one. It just seems to me that you kind of rant about crafting systems from all over the place, without checking whether these issues actually pertain to PoE.

IIRC, the dead animancer in GV says that souls do suffer entropy - "Rymrgand's work", or words to that effect. And it fits in with what Rymrgand wants you to do at the end of the game. Now, whether that is fact or theory, is not clear. But it seems probable. Why the Engwithans would create a god that personifies the diminishing and permanent destruction of souls, is another question. Do souls have an expiry date? I.e. are they only capable of being reborn a certain amount of time, and not strong or whole enough to power a being after some cycles? And where do souls come from? Are they created, or is there a finite number endlessly reborn and recombined, until they fade into nothing? If that is the case, when will the world be devoid of life? It seems to be general consensus in the game, IIRC, that death and rebirth usually wipes a soul's memory - you do not remember your past lives. Watchers are an exemption to this, as is Thaos. Whether memories are really deleted or just buried and may be brought back, is not made completely clear, I think.

Class changes? Most of the changes and bug fixes are retroactive, i.e. also affect your current save game. It's usually mentioned in the patch notes whether fixes are retroactive or not. Stat changes on companions do not affect your current save game if you have already recruited that companion.

Well, the main reason for the fog of war in an IE game is for you to check whether you've explored the whole area. Which is why those corners you can't reach and uncover really bug me.

In the scene with Aloth, your character doesn't suddenly start swearing. He/she just repeats what Aloth/Iselmyr has been saying earlier. Aloth says {rude stuff}, and you can call him out on it saying "you just said {rude stuff}". You can do that in a straightforward way, or you can sugar coat it. Aloth insults the villagers, they're about to attack him because of that; you can intervene and either help him kill the villagers, or drive them away. Afterwards, you're talking with the guy who just got attacked, and you've probably just killed three otherwise quite innocent people for him, and talk about exactly that situation. It's not you suddenly swearing at a complete stranger; it's you discussing what just happened, which started with a quite rude insult. And it's modern language because the game uses modern language. Replacing perfectly normal words for some made-up fantasy equivalent is, imho, as ridiculous as unnecessary bleeping on TV. There's no need for it. "I think it doesn't fit" is all well; "it's a fact" is not. With the steward suddenly bursting into swearing, I even tend to agree with you - it came somewhat out of the blue, and the only reason I could think of was him being affected by the whole situation in the village. But it's not about whether he uses English, Aedyran, or Cantonese or whatever. Replacing his "sh*t" with a made-up fantasy word, wouldn't change that he's suddenly swearing without you expecting him to. But the Aloth scene is, in my opinion, perfectly fine and appropriate.

Nope. After all, it's only a very short time (days? weeks, tops). That's not nearly enough to get done anything substantial.

In Act III, in an area called Northweald. You have to go through various other areas searching for him, though. It is not only important, it is necessary to have Sagani in the party to even get the encounter with Persoq. I believe he's simply not there if she's not in the party.

CLUAConsole:ExploreArea()

a) No, "your" character didn't. He had the *option* to do it, if you, the player, found it in-character for him. If your character did swear in that situation, it is nobody's but your own fault. Yours alone, because you chose that dialogue option. Don't complain about your own decisions. If you didn't choose that option, then no one in that scene used swear words (apart from Iselmyr, of course). Why complaining? b) You did notice that the game's language is usually contemporary American English? They use certain terms from the invented languages for things that don't exactly correspond to English words - a Vailian duc is not the same as an English duke, and a fampyr is not Robert Pattinson. The action of having sexual intercourse with your closer relatives, however, is a concept that is well-known to English-speakers (in theory, one hopes), and basically the same on both Eora and Earth. There is no need for using foreign languages. c) We get it, you don't like swear words.

Can we un-bump?

I take exception to "all the backers". I didn't say anything on that issue. (Or most others, to be honest.) OTOH, special loot (anyone has a similarly cool name for that?) always feels like the game master / developers cheating. "In lieu of doing AI to make things harder, we just give our Xaurips spears+3. No, you can't loot them." Or: "We made this very cool bad guy who wears really nice armour. No, we didn't make it wearable, and its armour class travels at the speed of plot. Also, it won't turn up as loot, of course." It's annoying both ways.

New account reviving that train wreck. Great move, guys.

The "mes Rèi" is part of Pallegina's name.

To be honest, I disliked BG's and BG2's caps back in the day, and installed cap removers when I became aware of them. I can bring myself to finish the main quest after hitting the cap, and maybe a side quest if it has a really useful item, but much of the incentive to do random side stuff is gone. Because, let's be honest, the side quests with such amazing stories that you simply have to experience them are, well, somewhat rare. So in the end, there's XP and/or items as reasons to do them. OTOH, if you have a level cap, I'd ideally hit it some time before the end of the main quest, in order to actually use all the cool stuff I've been given. That was a major thing in Planescape:Torment for me - they had all these awesome high-level spells with special cutscenes, but in the majority of cases, I didn't hit the levels necessary to actually cast them until maybe right in the end, when it was somewhat pointless. The other way to tackle this was maybe BG2:ToB - it was next to impossible to hit the cap (5 mio XP, IIRC) with a full party, but the last levels didn't add something substantial. You got a few HP and maybe another spell slot, but these weren't the things winning the game. Now, that's possible at the very end, when it doesn't really matter any more. If you have important perks up to level 12 and from then on, only give out minor bonuses, that's not that good, either. Lose-lose, either way.

And special thanks to Tony Jacobsen and Mike Mitchell, who apparently did all the work on the whole documentary!

Assuming, just for a moment, that Luj1 is interested in an actual discussion: 20k is not that hard to come by. Why don't we see lots of really good RPGs come out of the garages of this world?

Hm? They tell you how Dyrwood, the Vailian Republics, and Readceras came to be. The rest is outside of the game's scope. Have a very nice day. -fgalkin I'm not talking about countries and their fairly basic and boring origins. I'm talking about nations. Where is the french revolution, enlighment and similar stuff that would enable this people to overcome racial, tribal and feudal obstacles and form "nations"? How are Eoran "nations" any different from pre-nationalism Earth states? "Nation", in this context, is a fairly vague term signifying regions with a common cultural heritage. Generally, I find it quite shocking that many people apparently can't imagine a society where biological race (which is a ridiculous concept on Earth) is not the main dividing factor.

They give you the opportunity to play a character who swears. How is that wrong? If you don't choose that option, the line will never have appeared in your game world. If you choose that option, it is because the character you're playing would say such things. They give you, the player, the choice to consciously introduce this kind of language in that situation into your game. If you don't think your character would say something like that, choose one of the others. Also, as previously noted: They didn't change "duke" to "duc". They created a language (or parts of a language) that is based on the Romance languages (Italian/Catalan/various others), and the perfectly Italian word "duce" (leader) transforms into a Vailian "duc". That English happened to borrow the exact same word as "duke", is a nice bonus that ensures understanding of the term, but it is not the source of it. Similarly, Engwithan is based on Welsh. In Welsh, you write a V as F, so "vampire" becomes "fampyr". It's not necessarily because "we want to be different" but because of "our language would write this word that way".

16:20 - someone been explaining Cyrillic? :D

Yep, you do have that option in your conversation with Aloth. You can be blunt and tell it how it is ("F your sister"), or you can word it... more leniently, which is labelled "Diplomatic".

It is as SeekDWay said: "Party XP" is how much you got for the last step in the quest (like turning it in). "Quest XP" is the sum of XP you got through all the stages of this quest, and it only appears once you finish a quest.

Level scaling is bad. Period. But then, I have no problem with overlevelling. The whole point of levelling is getting stronger to beat the bad guys more easily. If I plough through enemy hordes being at the recommended / intended level for that part of the game, that's not good. If the game gives me opportunities to earn a few levels and then cut those hordes to pieces, that's how it should be. I hate level scaling with a passion. In PoE Act 2, if I go to Dyrford first, I might be slightly over level for Defiance Bay. If I go to Defiance Bay first, I'll probably be over level for Dyrford. If I put in a few levels of Od Nua in between, I might be stronger than intended for either. That's fine. That's the whole point of levelling up.